Zinky Boys Read Free

stupid … ’
    To write (or tell) the whole truth about oneself is a physical impossibility, according to Pushkin.
    â€˜Revenge for Malkin!’ scrawled in red paint on a tank.
    In the middle of the road a young Afghan woman kneels byher dead child, howling. I thought only wounded animals howled like that.
    We drive past devastated villages. They remind me of ploughed fields. The shapeless mounds of mud, family homes not long ago, frighten me more than the darkness which may be concealing enemy snipers.
    At the hospital I watched a Russian girl put a teddy bear on an Afghan boy’s bed. He picked up the toy with his teeth and played with it, smiling. He had no arms. ‘Your Russians shot him,’ his mother told me through the interpreter. ‘Do you have kids? A boy or a girl?’ I couldn’t make out whether her words expressed more horror or forgiveness.
    There are many stories of the cruelty with which the mujahedin treat our POWs. It is, literally, a different era here — the fourteenth century, according to their calendars.
    In Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time , Maximych says of the mountain-tribesman who has killed Valla’s father: ‘Of course, according to their lights he was completely in the right’ — although from the Russian’s point of view the deed was quite bestial. Lermontov here pinpointed the amazing ability of Russians to put themselves into other people’s shoes — to think according to ‘their’ lights, in fact.
    Stories:
    â€˜We captured some terrorists and interrogated them: “Where are your arms dumps?” No answer. Then we took a couple of them up in helicopters: “Where are they? Show us!” No answer. We threw one of them on to the rocks … ’
    â€˜They killed my friend. Later I saw some of them laughing and having a good time. Whenever I see a lot of them together, now, I start shooting. I shot up an Afghan wedding, I got the happy couple, the bride and groom. I’m not sorry for them — I’ve lost my friend’.
    In Dostoevsky’s novel Ivan Karamazov observes: ‘No animal can be as cruel, so exquisitely and artistically cruel, as man.’
    Yes, and I suspect we prefer to shut our eyes and ears to such truth. In every war, whether it’s fought in the name of Julius Caesar or Joseph Stalin, people kill each other. It’s killing, sure enough, but we don’t like to think of it as such: even in ourschools, for some reason, the education is officially described not as patriotic but as military patriotic education. I say ‘for some reason’, but there’s no secret about it: the aim is military socialism and a militarised country. And do we really want it any other way?
    People shouldn’t be subjected to such extremes of experience. They just can’t take it. In medicine it’s called ‘sharp-end experience’ — in other words, experimenting on the living.
    Today someone quoted Tolstoy’s phrase that ‘man is fluid’.
    This evening we switched on the cassette-recorder and heard Afgantsi songs — written and sung by veterans of this war. Childish, unformed voices, trying to sound like Vissotsky * , croaked out: ‘The sun set on the kishlak like a great big bomb’; ‘Who needs glory? I want to live — that’s all the medal I need’; ‘Why are we killing — and getting killed?’; ‘Why’ve you betrayed me so, sweet Russia?’; ‘I’m already forgetting their faces’; ‘Afghanistan, our duty and our universe too’; ‘Amputees like big birds hopping one-legged by the sea’; ‘He doesn’t belong to anyone now he’s dead. There’s no hatred in his face now he’s dead’.
    Last night I had a dream: some of our soldiers are leaving Afghanistan and I’m among those seeing them off. I go up to one boy, but he’s got no tongue,